Misconceptions generally lead to a lot of disappointment and Verizon/Motorola hate when phones release, so here’s what you should realistically expect out of this phone, all compiled in one thread instead of across hundreds of threads and thousands of posts on the Forum. Don't expect anything groundbreaking, this is likely a reiteration of what you know if you lurk forums as much as I do, this is to help those that don't and provide links (throughout the post, the links are 'points of interest' related to the subject that open in a new window to save where you're reading). I'll update and edit it if anything groundbreaking actually happens. Note that nothing is for sure, and that at any point in time Motorola can and very possibly could change specifications in this phone, they have already completely revamped it once, after all.

There’s tons of rumors about this device, but almost no facts. Thanks to sealed lips from Verizon, Motorola and even Best Buy (never thought they could keep their mouths shut, did you?), speculation has given us a lot of fun misconceptions and jokes.

Note: Unofficial image of the Droid Bionic​

Bionic Background

The Droid Bionic was announced officially at CES in January of 2011. There had been rumors circulating about the device for even months before this, building anticipation and rumors that the Dual Core powerhouse would be Verizon/Motorola’s flagship after the Blunderbolt. The Bionic was announced for a Quarter 2 release, only a couple of months after the Atrix was successfully added to AT&T’s 4G network. Rumors, advertisements, speculation, and even sign up pages spread, but alas, as many other 4G phones were having troubles, clearly the Bionic was as well.

Quarter 2 passed and left a lot of people scrambling for other 4G phones that unfortunately all had positives and some big negatives, leaving some of the bitterness that the Bionic should have been released by then. As a flagship phone, Motorola scrapped the OG Bionic in fear of complications and went back to the drawing board claiming the delay was for phone 'enhancements.' You have to give Motorola and Verizon credit for euphemisms, at least. And here we are today, still awaiting an official announcement from, well…anyone.

Quick Notes

The Droid Bionic is intended to be an improvement on all the 4G phones that are available on the Verizon network currently, marketed as the 4G dual core flagship phone from Motorola.

There have been no official release dates specified since CES 2011, which claimed a Q2 release. After the remaking, there have not been official time announcements short of “Summer 2011”by Verizon… which gives them until September 23rd, 2011 to be on time.

The phone will be the largest flagship smartphone on Verizon’s market and will not have a keyboard.

Now what you really want to know…

Specifications

Size and display – The Bionic device itself will be coming in as if carrying a staggering 4.5” screen, but the screen itself will be a 4.3” qHD Gorilla Glass display with an assumed improved resolution of 960 x 540. The screen does not go all the way to the edges of the phone, which explains why it is the size of a 4.5'' device. Actual dimensions of the phone are unknown.
Expectations are that the display will be Motorola’s favorite PenTile, which conserves battery while providing a much brighter viewing experience at the cost of slight pixelation in the phones with this technology currently. There have been more improvements on the PenTile display, and although it is not confirmed you can view a great in-depth review of the X2's PenTile display here. The Bionic will also be micro-HDMI capable with a mirroring option for the media hogs.

Note: Unofficial images of the Droid Bionic​

Wireless Capability – The phone will release with all your favorite wireless capabilities, including but not limited to Bluetooth, 3G, Tethering, and best of all, 4G LTE for those in 4G areas.

Dual Core Processor – The processor is to be made by TI (OMAP 4430) and will be clocked at 1.0 Ghz like the Droid 3. Rumor has it that it may have been improved to a newer model (4440+), clocking in at either 1.2 Ghz or 1.5 Ghz, but there is no evidence to currently back this. Only time will tell, as it took breaking into the Droid 3 to find out what its processor was, even after release.

Bootloader – Even with the better stock MotoBlur coming out, the bootloader is a selling point to a lot of Android enthusiasts. The bootloader will surely be locked. However, as with several other Motorola bootloaders, it should be unlocked in a reasonable time with the developer support, and until that time you will be stuck with MotoBlur and plenty of bloatware.

RAM– The phone will release with 1 GB of blazing fast DDR2 RAM. For details on how this RAM will likely be utilized in this device, you can look here (courtesy of GBH2).

Onboard Memory, SD Card and Battery – All three are highly speculated since the initial remodelling of the Bionic. It is rumoured at 16 GB onboard with 32 GB SD memory card optional. The battery has been rumoured between 1650 mAh and 1950 mAh, which could be lower than initially expected. However, expect plenty of extended battery options to be available and cross your fingers that Motorola has taken heed of this extra time to extend battery life on its premiere 4G device.

Price - Although there has not been any mention of pricing, using other phones as examples we will likely be seeing the Bionic dropping in at $249 on contract or $299 on contract with a 32 GB SD card. As with the Droid 3, expect prices to drop sharply after a week or more of sales.

Planned Release Date - Speculations stretch from as early as July 28th to as late as September 22nd. The recent signup page on Verizon's website gives a sense of hope, but that lack of leaks and official announcements for a flagship phone makes it more difficult to be optimistic.

Preach2K can you post that link that debunks the webtop RAM allocation myth so we can all be on the same page with the amount of available RAM on the Bionic?

Click to expand...

Are you talking about the full GB being utilized and allocation only occuring while the Webtop is enabled? I have no heard anything about the webtop RAM being usable with the phone itself yet.
I'll edit it in if you have the link dancedroid

no one can say for sure about the webtop OS and ram utilization until the phone comes out. i've seen theories that webtop shouldn't hoard ram, even when it's not in use - but i think those are largely theoretical discussions. over at HoFo, Winston25 has acknowledged that the webtop OS will have a certain amount of ram dedicated to it, even when it's not in use. whether that's 50% of the ram, or some smaller percentage, no one knows for sure....BECAUSE MOTO HASN'T SHOWN US THE DANG PHONE!!

Webtop does not reserve or use up RAM unless it is docked and will have ~800mb or so available right from boot up. I believe that the Atrix thing was started because it has 1gig of RAM so many assumed 512 for this and 512 for that because other phones were shipping with 512. A program/OS reserving RAM is stupid if it turns out it's true, Android is more than capable of shutting down programs it does not need when the phone is in "webtop mode" to make sure it has enough RAM.

Preach2K can you post that link that debunks the webtop RAM allocation myth so we can all be on the same page with the amount of available RAM on the Bionic?

Click to expand...

Are you talking about the full GB being utilized and allocation only occuring while the Webtop is enabled? I have no heard anything about the webtop RAM being usable with the phone itself yet.
I'll edit it in if you have the link dancedroid

i don't have any basis to disagree with the people over at xda (mainly because i'm not quite that code literate). however, even assuming that the phone can be configured to not reserve ram for the webtop, that doesn't mean that it will be. here's what Winston25 said over at HoFo in response to this exact question:

I think webtop has amazing potential, especially if the 3rd party community starts working it. Being Linux based that shouldn't be that hard.
As for its effect on a phone, don't believe those people trashing it so hard. Your phone doesn't use all the RAM anyway. They just hate extra stuff on their, regardless if it affects it or not.
If you run into a situation where you need the RAM the webtop has reserved, than you are doing way to much at one time on your phone.

to me, he is saying that the Bionic will, in fact, reserve some ram for the webtop - what amount is "some" is unknown.

Why do they hide the specs of the cpu? I am literally on an emotional roller coaster with what the speculation is. I don't want that 4430 processor. If moto is releasing another flagship that has been delay so much the way it is, they better have ground breaking cpus in it and not 2nd hand design that are in inferioir phones like the d3.

i don't have any basis to disagree with the people over at xda (mainly because i'm not quite that code literate). however, even assuming that the phone can be configured to not reserve ram for the webtop, that doesn't mean that it will be. here's what Winston25 said over at HoFo in response to this exact question:

I think webtop has amazing potential, especially if the 3rd party community starts working it. Being Linux based that shouldn't be that hard.
As for its effect on a phone, don't believe those people trashing it so hard. Your phone doesn't use all the RAM anyway. They just hate extra stuff on their, regardless if it affects it or not.
If you run into a situation where you need the RAM the webtop has reserved, than you are doing way to much at one time on your phone.

to me, he is saying that the Bionic will, in fact, reserve some ram for the webtop - what amount is "some" is unknown.

Click to expand...

This is what I knew while I was posting this thread. I'm trying to keep the rumors in perspective and not push something that isn't going to come true. Now my question regarding the RAM wouldn't be whether it reserves 512 MB of RAM, it's more of can the phone utilize more than 512 MB of RAM at one time? I realize that the dock will innately consume somewhere between 100-200 MB of RAM while not in use (this was posted in that Atrix study). What I'm concerned with is if it cannot use more than 512 MB of RAM without the laptop dock, it might as well be marketed as such. I haven't looked into it, but can the Atrix utilize more than 512 MB of RAM without the laptop dock engaged or being accounted for? If it can, then I would comfortably say that the Bionic will be the same, and around 800 MB of the 1 gig of RAM would be available to the phone, which would be nice...

I'll update the main post if someone can explain/direct me to something with that. I checked earlier and came up blank. I checked Jersey's links and came up with 404's :icon_evil:

Why do they hide the specs of the cpu? I am literally on an emotional roller coaster with what the speculation is. I don't want that 4430 processor. If moto is releasing another flagship that has been delay so much the way it is, they better have ground breaking cpus in it and not 2nd hand design that are in inferioir phones like the d3.

Sent from my Charge using DroidForums

Click to expand...

The best part of the CPU is the fact that it's the same CPU that is in the iPhone 4...
Yeah, that Apple phone that was released over a year ago. It may be dual core, but that doesn't make up for a chip that's over a year old.

i don't have any basis to disagree with the people over at xda (mainly because i'm not quite that code literate). however, even assuming that the phone can be configured to not reserve ram for the webtop, that doesn't mean that it will be. here's what Winston25 said over at HoFo in response to this exact question:

I think webtop has amazing potential, especially if the 3rd party community starts working it. Being Linux based that shouldn't be that hard.
As for its effect on a phone, don't believe those people trashing it so hard. Your phone doesn't use all the RAM anyway. They just hate extra stuff on their, regardless if it affects it or not.
If you run into a situation where you need the RAM the webtop has reserved, than you are doing way to much at one time on your phone.

to me, he is saying that the Bionic will, in fact, reserve some ram for the webtop - what amount is "some" is unknown.

Click to expand...

This is what I knew while I was posting this thread. I'm trying to keep the rumors in perspective and not push something that isn't going to come true. Now my question regarding the RAM wouldn't be whether it reserves 512 MB of RAM, it's more of can the phone utilize more than 512 MB of RAM at one time? I realize that the dock will innately consume somewhere between 100-200 MB of RAM while not in use (this was posted in that Atrix study). What I'm concerned with is if it cannot use more than 512 MB of RAM without the laptop dock, it might as well be marketed as such. I haven't looked into it, but can the Atrix utilize more than 512 MB of RAM without the laptop dock engaged or being accounted for? If it can, then I would comfortably say that the Bionic will be the same, and around 800 MB of the 1 gig of RAM would be available to the phone, which would be nice...

I'll update the main post if someone can explain/direct me to something with that. I checked earlier and came up blank. I checked Jersey's links and came up with 404's :icon_evil:

Why do they hide the specs of the cpu? I am literally on an emotional roller coaster with what the speculation is. I don't want that 4430 processor. If moto is releasing another flagship that has been delay so much the way it is, they better have ground breaking cpus in it and not 2nd hand design that are in inferioir phones like the d3.

Sent from my Charge using DroidForums

Click to expand...

The best part of the CPU is the fact that it's the same CPU that is in the iPhone 4...
Yeah, that Apple phone that was released over a year ago. It may be dual core, but that doesn't make up for a chip that's over a year old.

I think this post states the information about RAM usage pretty succinctly. There is some more interesting info in that thread IIRC. When the phone is not in Webtop mode webtop does not "reserve" any RAM. I believe this myth began because the GPU reserves some RAM and the system uses RAM, people expected to see 1 Gb when they turned on theory Atrix's and when it showed less than 1 Gb they immediately blamed it on Webtop.

I think that you should actually state that the phone has 1Gb of DDR2 and leave it at that unless someone can "prove" that it isn't available - I have looked there is no such evidence, just rumor and conjecture.

Why do they hide the specs of the cpu? I am literally on an emotional roller coaster with what the speculation is. I don't want that 4430 processor. If moto is releasing another flagship that has been delay so much the way it is, they better have ground breaking cpus in it and not 2nd hand design that are in inferioir phones like the d3.

Sent from my Charge using DroidForums

Click to expand...

The best part of the CPU is the fact that it's the same CPU that is in the iPhone 4...
Yeah, that Apple phone that was released over a year ago. It may be dual core, but that doesn't make up for a chip that's over a year old.

Click to expand...

What are you guys talking about? The OMAP4 platform has not been around for over a year. The iPhone4 CPU was a Cortex A8 variation @800MHz with a PowerVR535. The OMAP4430 is a dual-core Cortex A9 variation @1GHz with a PowerVR540. They are not even close to the same.

And the 4430 is not some 2nd-hand CPU. It's in the same family as the 4460. My guess is that the 4460 is the higher TDP version for tablets, which is often the case when 2 different SoC variants are released in the same platform. You guys are just grasping at straws to find fault with the Bionic at this point. Calling the 4430 a "2nd hand design" when it's the best SoC on the market right now is pretty ridiculous.

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